by Jay Lake
The Factor shook his head. “Oh, no. I was never a god.”
“I do not think this one should be, either. He is too cruel and foolish.”
“Did I make you to be a judge?”
I tried to stare him down, but that is impossible with a ghost. He did not blink. “No, but you made of me a person who is capable of judging, at need.”
“You, who would kill gods, also have learned the ways of doing that?” His smile remained wicked. “My education must have been very deep, indeed.”
“I l-learned that in the world. But to do what must be done, I need your help. Or at the least your advice.”
The Factor spread his hands, like a greengrocer who has run out of turnips and must apologize. “You have only to ask.”
Such a curious echo of Corinthia Anastasia’s remark. It took me a moment to unravel that he meant for me to request his aid right at that moment. “Fine. Will you please help me save your city, and yourself, from this man who would be the god-king?”
“Yes.”
He must fear Choybalsan far more desperately than I—he could not just board a ship, for example. The Factor made this sound so simple, so condescending, that for a moment I would have slain him all over again if I’d had such power.
______
A while later, I sat on a step. The Factor paced before me. He made no noise except when he spoke. I’d just finished telling him of the fight within Choybalsan’s tent.
“What made you think you could harm a god?” he demanded.
“He looked like a man.” I shrugged, feeling vaguely ashamed. “Besides, I have heard of god-killers here in Copper Downs. If they could do so, why not I?”
The Factor waved that off as inconsequential. “They were specialists from the Saffron Tower, passing through. One was not even human.”
“Where did they fare next?”
“Selistan.”
A stab of cold fear found my heart.
His malicious smile widened the wound. “Did someone go after you there?” he asked.
“I am no goddess,” I told him. But I knew one. This killing was old news. Whoever they were, they had come and gone from Kalimpura long ago. Or so I devoutly hoped.
The Factor pushed the question. “Do you think you harmed him?”
“Only with the touch of my bare hands. I wish I’d thought to crush his chest while shoeless.” I spread my fingers and looked at them. “Not until I reached Kalimpura did I learn to fight properly.”
“You did well enough here,” the Factor told me grudgingly.
I glanced up to see some distant emotion in those eyes. Had he been handsome once, four hundred years ago when he was a young man with a name and a future? “Perhaps,” I said.
“Where is my part in this?”
“It is doubtful that I can bring him down weaponless,” I admitted. “He is far more powerful than the largest man. I came back to the city looking for you, in hopes that you could raise the sendings and avatars that haunt the Below. Fighting Skinless taught me how they must be struck. Federo-as-Choybalsan is turning into one of them.”
“Larval gods,” he said with disgust. “Buds of the divine.”
“Choybalsan is the get of no god.” I added, “Except maybe you.”
“I can promise you Federo had no touch of the divine. Whatever Choybalsan is, it uses him as a host. Much as those wasps that lay their eggs inside other insects. That is why he is so powerful. A sending is little more than the cyst of a dream, loosened from the divine mind.” He was becoming angry again. “I spent much of my effort stamping them out, as a source of future trouble. He is a sending wrapped in a man.”
“When he goes into town and plays the councilor, we see no lightning.”
The Factor looked thoughtful. “The god may remain behind. Perhaps in that altar you mentioned.”
I became excited. “In which case, we must attack Choybalsan at the Textile Bourse. He will be without his army, and lacking the full mantle of his powers!”
“Though I do not agree, neither am I ready to deny you.” He renewed his pacing. “If I had Skinless, or something like it, we might be able to deal with the god. Have you ever seen dolphins kill a shark?”
“Uh . . . no.”
“A shark of any size is more than a match for a lone dolphin. They are tough, powerful, and very dangerous. The dolphin cannot bite back. He has no swords in his mouth.” The Factor grinned. All I could think of was the great dead-eyed monster that had nearly taken me when I first set out from Selistan. He continued: “Any one dolphin would fall before the shark like a child before a drunken guardsman. A dozen dolphins can surround a shark and batter him to death, moving too quickly for him to stop them.”
“You want to surround Choybalsan with Skinless?”
“With sendings and avatars. The gods are stirring. I would prefer to lay them once more to quiet rest, but I would use their children for this before our argument can be ended by the deaths of all.”
I nodded. He’d come to the same conclusion as I. “Then I will go above the stones and look for what friends I can. It may be of use to have a few arms in the corporeal world.”
“As you will. But I cannot raise Skinless. The monster is too well kept within the Algeficic Temple. It roams sometimes, but it is not free like the older ones.”
“The canny ones, whom you never caught,” I said. “Mother Iron.”
“Precisely.” He looked irritated now.
I had my own problems with that temple. The god was a horror, and the Pater Primus a traitor, at the least. Still, they would no more profit by the coming of Choybalsan than anyone else. “I will do what I can.”
He glanced over at the square of light admitted by the grate high in the ceiling. “It is a bit past the noon hour. If Federo is yet in the Textile Bourse, we must catch him today. Meet me at the Lyme Street cistern three fingers before the sun sets.”
I actually knew where that was. Nodding, I opened my mouth to speak, but the Factor was gone. Gone as if he’d never been there in the first place.
Looking at my arm, I saw the long wound I’d made. I twirled the bell in my hand. A muffled clop sounded.
I followed the steps on which I sat, until I found an exit.
The stairs came up behind a set of public baths. A blessed good thing. It is difficult to persuade people to a cause when you are coated in drying sewage. I stepped out through a little closet. The steam was high, so these lower baths were in use. I stole to the first tub and slipped in, clothes and all, until I was completely under the near-scalding water.
Holding my breath, I scrubbed at my hair. A minute later, I came up gasping and began to search for my veil. I could not remember where I’d had it last.
At least I still held the knife and the bell.
“You are supposed to wash before you sit in here,” said a man across from me. He was only a shadow through the curtains of steam.
I had company, too. My hand closed on the haft of the knife.
“The water has been terribly dirtied.” I knew that voice. He continued: “I should call the attendants and have you beaten and thrown out.”
Recognition dawned.
“Stefan Mohanda,” I said. What in the name of all the gods was he doing here? “Or should I call you the Pater Primus?”
“Either is correct.” He leaned forward, becoming a firmer silhouette as the stinking water sloshed back toward me with its scum of sewage, slime, and blood. “Though never both at once. The scrying mirror told me where to expect you. Now what have you done with my favorite priest?”
“Your fellow councilor laid open his gut and let him die.”
“Federo? Never.” The Pater Primus laughed grimly. “The god I could easily believe that of. Not the man. A pity about Septio. He was a good lad, with the ass of an angel.”
He knew. Everything. My knife hand lay easy in the bath before me. I had not trained for water fighting, but I doubted very much this man had, either. His age and size
would slow him.
Never let the enemy see your attack. That had been one of Mother Vajpai’s first lessons. I stalled, talking to cover my small movements. “If you knew, why the charade of sending Septio with me up into the hills?”
“You asked to go.” He sounded delighted. “You would bring yourself to him in the seat of his power. So much easier than abducting you from the city against your will. Surely you realize that you are very difficult to move unwilling.”
I began to slide up out of the tub. “Then I will be on my way, and leave you—” Even as I spoke, I kicked off from the tiled wall beneath my feet, flinging myself at him. That was an attack I would not dare against a prepared enemy.
Mohanda, unfortunately for me, was prepared.
Unfortunately for him, he was also slow.
He raised himself up, thin robe dripping, something long and dark in his hand. For one horrified moment, I thought it was a crossbow. I crashed into that arm above the weapon, then slid my boning knife up into his armpit, letting the leverage of my sinking weight drive the blade farther.
A stupid blow, weak and wrong-angled, but it worked. Mohanda’s arm nearly separated from his shoulder. He shrieked like a child as dark blood gushed from the gaping wound to flood down his body and into the tub. His panicked thrashing kept the blood pouring.
I snatched up his weapon. That was a short iron bar with a reversed barb at the top. Purely defensive—he’d expected me to attack. That meant he almost certainly had allies close by.
Flipping the bar around, I set the barb into the bouncing flab of his belly and smacked it hard with my other hand.
More foulness in the water as I tugged the bar free. I leaned close. “A pity about the Pater Primus. He was never a good man.”
I tugged my knife from his body and, weapons in hand, tried to scrabble out of the tub, but I slipped. Mohanda clutched at my ankle. His eyes had already rolled upward, but his mouth moved. I bent close without setting my ear where he could spit a barb or some such.
“Blackblood . . .” That was all he said.
I kicked his head so that he slid into the water, then splashed quickly through the next pool as well as the one after that, rinsing as best I could. I felt badly soiled, far more so than I had wading through the drain Below. Climbing out of the second pool, I paused at the door. I was worried about priests on the other side. Or worse, a temple horror like Skinless.
It occurred to me that one way to kill a god was to kill his priests. That required little special training. Without prayer and ceremony, a god will atrophy. Time spun away with every moment for the divine as surely as it did for the human.
“Life is risk,” I whispered, and kicked open the door to race into the next room.
The wood struck a man in the jaw, knocking him screaming to the floor. He’d been too close. His friend I caught with a cut across the face that did little more than loosen his nostrils, but also served to drive him back. Still moving fast, I took the third in the gut with my shoulder. The fourth grabbed at me hard, but I smacked him in the groin with the handle of Mohanda’s weapon.
After that, it was a quick run for the stairs and through the upper baths, which were occupied as normal, at least until my bloody-handed appearance set people to a panic. I rushed with them out into the street.
I needed to reach the Tavernkeep’s place quickly. Tucking my head down and sprinting, I looked for some place to climb unseen. Shouting echoed behind me. I took two corners hard, jumped onto an unattended cart, and from there rolled myself onto the flat roof of some portico. I tucked close against the building as the chase pounded by just below.
After a quick twenty count to let them get ahead, I wriggled to the end of the portico and dropped into the street between the cart and the building. A fat man in an apron over a denim shirt, wearing a straw boater, stared at me with a crate of something in his hands.
“Blessings on your house,” I said in Seliu, then turned into the nearest alley.
Next it was a simple matter to gain the roofs two storeys up. I found a wooden water tank and cleaned myself thoroughly within, then broke the bottom. The flood would greatly trouble the people in the building below, but less so than drinking the water I’d fouled. I climbed down in the other end of the alley, stole a white shirt off a line, and quietly walked the rest of the way to the Tavernkeep’s place.
When I found the tavern, Chowdry was in the main room serving something that smelled very much like home. The scent set my stomach to gurgling. Chowdry looked up and broke into a smile.
“Green, you are being alive!”
“Please,” I replied in Seliu. “I must eat a little, and speak to the Tavernkeep at once.”
“He is marketing.” Chowdry looked around the room. A pair of pardines sat near the fireplace at table with a stoneware bowl and a scattering of flowers. One was the Rectifier, though I did not recognize the other. “You are knowing the Sentence, yes?”
The Sentence? “The Rectifier?”
“I say what his name means, I am thinking.” Chowdry looked apologetic.
That fit. In a strange way.
“Please,” I said. “Some curry.”
He nodded, fidgeted through part of a bow, then ran back into the kitchen. I quickly stepped to the table.
The Rectifier looked up at me. “You should take trophies, you know.” He gave me a feral smile. “I smell the killing on you.”
“I cannot wear the knucklebones so elegantly as some.” Taking a seat, I said to the other pardine, “I am Green. Known to this one a little, and known better to the Tavernkeep.”
She returned my small nod. “You are known.”
As was the manner of their people, she offered no name. She was rangy, perhaps the thinnest of them I’d seen, with tan fur that shaded almost white down her chest and belly. Neither she nor the Rectifier wore much in the way of clothing, unlike the city dwellers such as the Tavernkeep or the Dancing Mistress.
“You are in the midst of a battle?” the Rectifier asked politely.
“In a sense.” I saw no point in coyness. “I seek to throw down the bandit-king who hunts your people near extinction. We hope to catch him before the end of the day, unawares and unprepared.”
“You have an army?” the brown woman asked.
“No. But he is in the city today under guise, and does not have his army, either.” My next words caught in my throat. I forced them out anyway. “I have fought him once already, with the Dancing Mistress beside me. We escaped with our lives. I believe I know how to fight him again.”
The Rectifier grinned wider. “Where will this battle be, so that I might avoid the site at the proper time?”
“The Textile Bourse. Just before the sun downs.” I laid my hands flat on the table. “I have an ally seeking help that can meet Choybalsan on his own terms. I am more concerned with whatever corporeal protection he has with him there. I will need to clear his shields before we can bear him down.”
“So you wish to fight the city’s own guards,” the brown woman said. “After they beat you senseless and leave you in the cells beneath Penitent’s Rest, what plan will you have then?”
“If we succeed, peace for Copper Downs and your people,” I said promptly. “If we fail, I doubt we’ll live to be arrested.”
“Go raise your army of thugs,” the Rectifier said. “We will think on this awhile.”
Then Chowdry came with the curry: fish in masaman, coriander, and Hanchu parsley over steamed rice. It met my gut with a delicious rumble, and recalled me to the hot, wet air of Selistan. I said almost nothing as I ate. The pardines made no answer at all.
The food sufficed.
When I had cleaned my bowl dry, I stood and bowed. “Sometimes it is worth being on the side of the good.”
“If only you know which side that is,” the brown woman answered.
I nodded at them both and departed.
The crux of the problem came back to Skinless, and with it the seed of my solution. M
other Iron and the other sendings might well be able to mob and drive down Choybalsan, but Blackblood’s avatar had the god’s cruel strength. The avatar was almost an aspect, in truth. And Choybalsan was something more than a northern tulpa.
The god wore the man like a cloak.
I did not think that Blackblood would hold any use for me now. I had slain at least two of his priests, and perhaps more in the baths. His cult was not large. Of how much had I robbed him?
Sanity argued that even approaching the Algeficic Temple under these circumstances bordered on suicide.
My hopes for any success in the coming battle argued that I make the approach.
I wandered, going closer to the Temple Quarter in wide passages across city blocks as I tried to convince myself to do this thing. I prayed for guidance. The Lily Goddess was never so neat as to send me a sign at a time such as this, except for the blessing of my continued existence.
Septio could not advise me. The Dancing Mistress could not advise me. The Blade Mothers were not here.
In the end, I fell back on my oldest guides of all. What would Endurance have me do? What would my grandmother have me do?
That was when I knew I must find a way to make all this end decently. Whatever the cost to me. I could not let this city fall.
I found a quiet park a few blocks from the Temple Quarter. It wasn’t much more than an unbuilt corner planted with elms and rhododendrons. A stele stood at the center of a little square of grass in commemoration of some long-vanished personage.
Drifting past it, I sat under the tree in the farthest corner. There I toyed with the bell. I wondered why I was carrying it now.
To remind you of what you lost, said a voice within my head. Of what every child loses, even if they stay at their mother’s hearth all the days of their life.
That was said so clearly that I looked around, expecting to find someone close by. Conscience, I supposed. Or my Goddess finally answering me.
